Many wireless communication devices utilize a single radio to communicate via multiple radio access technologies (RATs). In such single radio devices, the device can only tune to a single network/single RAT at a given time. Thus, if such a device is receiving data over a downlink (DL) connection via a network using a first RAT and tunes its radio from the first network to a network using a second RAT, such as in the case of a tune-away period from a Long Term Evolution (LTE) system to a 1× system to listen for paging messages on the 1× system, packets transmitted to the device during the tune-away period may be lost.
Packet loss suffered by a wireless communication device during an event causing a connection interruption, such as in the case of the device tuning its radio from a first network to a second network, can result in a break in the receipt of packets for a data transfer at the data layer. Further, such packet loss can cause a severe degradation of the throughput performance of the data transfer. In this regard, since the receiver conditions may be unknown to the sender, the packet loss can result in implementation of transmission control protocol (TCP) flow control mechanisms by the sender. These flow control mechanisms can include mechanisms, such as timeouts and data rate reductions, which may be undesirable and can result in a reduced throughput for the data transfer for a significant amount of time after the completion of the event that resulted in the connection interruption.